Tuesday, August 30, 2011

Mass Effect - Initial thoughts

So my brother has been on my ass about playing Mass Effect, so I decided that I'd give it a go. Also when I saw the trailer for the third game in an ad window and thought to myself, "That looks badass" only to realize that I was looking at ME 3, that told me it was time to get onboard with the whole ME thing. That's not to say I'm done playing Minecraft, far from it, just need to play something else for a bit, but I still want to play Minecraft so we'll see if I make it through ME, think I will though.

The funniest thing about playing ME is that my brother didn't like Dragon Age in large part due to the amount of talking that you have to do early on, which I admit is a draggggggggg...... So what is the second thing that you have to do in ME? That's right spend 2 hours talking to NPCs to get various quests and look around the Citadel, oh joy. I called him out on it and he said that it probably had more to do with the fact that later on you get to shoot and blow things up, fair enough dodge.

Talking to all of the NPCs was really getting boring, eventually I wrapped it all up and got to start shooting people again, at that point I began to give a shit about all of the talking again. Seriously they should have balanced that just a little better, I mean I like talking to NPCs, it's an RPG I expect that, but the whole feast or famine thing stinks, maybe ME 2 is better. But after I started fighting again then I started to take note of the codex and actually look for stuff to read or listen to in it, before it was just trying to get through the conversations. The codex though is pretty cool, there is a rich background to the universe that I want to keep diving deeper into and really learn about the world that I'm playing in, I love that sort of thing.

Mass Effect is recognized as a classic in many circles and I can see why even in my early stages in the game. The reason, is that I care about what is going to happen, this early on I'm curious about the characters and how the story is going to play out. Anyone that just dismisses video games for their potential to tell a story is just blind to their potential. Sadly some of the main press that this game got when it was released was that it had a 5 second sex scene in it, ignoring everything else about it. I don't really know how I feel about sex in video games because you do have kids playing them, but then again sex and violence do exist outside of video games, just turn on the news and bamm there you go.

Anyway curious to see how it all plays out, looks like an interesting game and I'm happy to have started playing it. I kind of hope it's not too long so that I can finish it and move on and get back to Minecraft, but that's just me being stupid.